


The Past is Never Dead

by raininshadows



Category: Exalted
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Past-Life Flashbacks, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-18 10:45:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13098450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raininshadows/pseuds/raininshadows
Summary: Arianna and Swan visit the ruins of Tzatli.





	The Past is Never Dead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [palmedfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/palmedfire/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I hope you like the fic!
> 
> This is set in an AU where the Haslanti haven't moved into the remains of Tzatli for whatever reason.
> 
> Thanks to shadow_lover on AO3 for betaing.

The ruins of Tzatli rose before them like an unusually literal monument to the fall of the First Age. Arianna had heard stories of the Lost City of the Anathema in the far north, but they’d all failed to capture the shattered glory she could see in every inch of Tzatli’s broken spires. According to her books, back in the First Age, Tzatli had actually been a flying city, kept aloft by powerful artifact engines and the magic of the Solar sorceress Bright Shattered Ice. The Usurpation had killed Bright Shattered Ice and destroyed the engines, leaving the city to crash into the tundra, where its remains had stood for fifteen hundred years.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, turning towards Swan. 

He nodded. “It is. We should probably get inside, though. The wind’s picking up.”

It was, but Arianna hadn’t noticed until he pointed it out. Between her Exaltation and the natural resistance to cold that came with living in the North her entire life, she often didn’t notice the cold weather until a normal person would have had reason to worry about hypothermia or frostbite. Swan, who’d grown up on a tropical island, was much more vulnerable.

Tzatli hadn’t sunk fully into the ground on impact, and fifty feet of vertical stone blocked their path into the city. The white coating, still reflective even with fifteen hundred years of ice coated onto it, was shattered and rough, although it had clearly once been smooth. Arianna stepped closer to the wall and began to examine it for footholds. The wall clearly wouldn’t be impossible to climb, but it wouldn’t be easy either.

By the time they made it to the top, the sun was beginning to set. The evening sky was a vivid pink on the horizon, shading through purple and into black. The valley that Tzatli had become lay spread out before Arianna and Swan, looking as though it had been untouched by human hands for untold eons. The edge of the valley was a circle of flat stone, about ten feet wide. On the other side, the ground fell away sharply and then leveled off, far deeper than the plains outside. On the slope, trees jutted out at improbable angles; below lay the remains of the broken city. 

The slope was tricky to navigate, but not beyond the capabilities of a pair of Solars, and once they were inside the bowl of the city, the rising wind outside was almost unnoticeable. By this point, night had fully fallen. 

The city had long since been ransacked by the Realm, the Haslanti, the Shogunate, various icewalker tribes, and anyone else who wanted some First Age tech, but Arianna was hoping to find something that had escaped the notice of previous scavengers. It would probably help that she was a Twilight Caste, as Bright Shattered Ice had been, and if her theory that she was the bearer of Bright Shattered Ice’s Exaltation was correct, she might be able to access parts of the city no one else could. 

They camped inside one of the few buildings still standing. The firelight flickered across the interior, stripped of all its contents millennia ago. 

“Where are we going once it’s light?” Swan asked. He was sitting closer to her than usual, nearly close enough that she could reach out and touch him. 

“The center,” Arianna said. “That was Bright Shattered Ice’s personal domain. If we can find anything of hers, it’s probably in what’s left of the building.” 

Swan nodded. “That makes sense.” 

The night passed fairly quietly. The wind died down overnight, and the sun rose on a glitteringly icy city. When Arianna and Swan left the building they’d been camping in, they found themselves standing at one end of a long road; at the other end, distantly, they could see what appeared to be massive shards of sapphire. “That’s it,” Arianna said, indicating the end of the road. “The great sapphire palace — that must be what’s left of it.” 

“Let’s go, then,” Swan said. 

Tzatli was about six miles across, so it wasn’t that long a walk. The weather was tamer than it had been outside, presumably because the walls of the city shielded them. The remains of the sapphire palace were waiting at the end of the road. The ground was covered in shards of sapphire that had long since been buried under ice.

“It’s beautiful,” Arianna whispered, reaching out to touch the remains of one wall. “It must have all shattered when the city fell, and it’s just been waiting here this whole time.” 

Swan kept moving deeper into the ruins of the palace complex. Arianna stared at the remains of the palace for a few moments more, then followed him. Some of the buildings seemed to have sunk into the ground. One of them was standing at the center of the palace, and therefore at the center of the city. Before the crash, it looked like it had been soaringly tall; now it barely managed two stories.

“I think that’s her,” she said suddenly. “Bright Shattered Ice is down there. Her tomb, at least.”

The tower was dark and badly damaged, presumably largely from crashing through the ground on impact. They spent a while navigating their way through it and down until finally encountering a remarkably pristine, and firmly locked, orichalcum door.

“This must be it,” Arianna breathed. “Bright Shattered Ice’s tomb.” 

Swan nodded. The yawning cave in the depths of shattered Tzatli certainly seemed to be more intact than everything surrounding it, as if it had been built after the city fell, and the Dragon-Blooded had quite possibly considered it fitting to turn Bright Shattered Ice’s greatest work into her final resting place.

The orichalcum door slid seamlessly away as Arianna flared her anima. She began to step inside, then paused and looked back at Swan. “Are you coming?”

“I wasn’t sure you wanted me to see this,” Swan said, following her inside. 

She shrugged. “I came with you to Desus’s tomb.”

As they moved further in, the room still lit entirely by Arianna’s anima, it started to look increasingly like some sort of laboratory. A group of flat metal tables clustered together around one side of the room; they seemed to have been moved, but dust coated the floor so heavily it was impossible to tell where they had originally been. A row of cabinets lined another wall. At the far end lay a bier made of still-pristine orichalcum. There was something written on a plaque in front of it, and a cluster of expensive-looking books arranged artistically next to the plaque. 

“‘Here lies Bright Shattered Ice, the greatest artificer of the First Age. This city of Tzatli, which soared above the clouds as if winged, was her creation; we leave it as her memorial,’” Arianna read quietly. She knelt down to run a hand along the carving, then turned to the books. Swan hung back while she picked one up. “Swan, these are her lab notebooks!” she blurted out as soon as she opened it. 

They spent that night in the tomb, which turned out by firelight to be obviously Bright Shattered Ice’s personal lab. Arianna continued to read through her notebooks, occasionally breaking off to go examine something in one of the darker corners of the lab or to tell Swan about the latest interesting thing she’d found. Swan was almost asleep when she picked up a new book.

“Hm,” she said. “Swan, look at this one. It seems different.” The handwriting was noticeably shakier than the other books, and the first line was “I can’t believe he left again.” The other notebooks had all been dry lab reports, unemotional and completely separated from Bright Shattered Ice’s personal life. Almost as soon as he moved over to look, Arianna felt a First Age flashback consuming her.

 _Desus pulled back from a kiss, smiling at her. “I have to go now, angel. Lilith’s waiting for me back in Meru. But I’ll be back soon, I promise.” She could feel cold fury welling up inside her again, the rising urge to hurt and kill and make someone pay for her pain. It couldn’t be Desus, but for a moment she desperately wished it could — that she could punish_ him _for hurting her._

_“Of course,” she said. Desus turned to walk away, towards where his shuttle was waiting; the door clicked shut behind him. She briefly considered trying to fight the anger down, but quickly decided it wasn’t worth it. There were some rule-breakers waiting in the cells, and she’d feel better after some time working on them._

She fell back into the present to see Swan staring at her. Simultaneously, they said “Did you just…” 

Arianna shivered. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that angry.” 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you that angry,” Swan said. “You looked like you wanted to hurt me.”

Arianna stared down at the notebook, not really looking at it. “I wanted to kill you.” 

There was a long, awkward silence. Finally, Swan broke it. “This will probably look better in the morning.” 

Arianna sighed. She hadn’t moved, just stared at that same page. “Yes.” 

Morning brought a few rays of true sunlight and a generally better feeling. “I think there’s something in the actual tomb,” Arianna said. “I don’t know why, it just feels like there’s something important in there.”

Swan nodded. “That would make sense. Jade said her powerbow was actually in her previous incarnation’s skeleton’s hands.” 

The orichalcum bier proved surprisingly easy to open. Inside, there was a skeleton, blanketed by an ostentatious white-and-gold cape. 

“That’s it,” Arianna said. “The cape. There’s power in it.” She reached in to touch it, then paused as her hand brushed it. “…I hope you’ve already found peace,” she said softly to Bright Shattered Ice’s skeleton, “but if not, may the Unconquered Sun smile on you and guide your soul to Lethe.” She drew the cape out slowly and carefully, leaving the skeleton as it was. 

“About last night,” she said to Swan as she laid it out on a clear patch of floor to examine it and knelt next to it. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said quickly. “It wasn’t you, it was just a First Age memory. That wasn’t really you any more than Desus is really me.”

Arianna shivered, the cape momentarily forgotten. “Yes, but it _felt_ so real. For a moment there I really did want to kill Desus, even knowing he’s been dead for thousands of years.” She glanced up at him. “Is that what it feels like when you have flashbacks?”

Swan shrugged. “Sort of. Desus was a terrible person, but he didn’t actually want to hurt people very often. He just did it casually, because they got in his way or because he didn’t care or for whatever other reason.” 

“He sounds terrible.”

“I can see why Lilith hated him, and hates me in his place,” Swan said, sitting down next to her. “It’s part of the reason I try to avoid reminders of him. I don’t worry about flashbacks giving me his emotions; I worry about them giving me his mindset, where other people are just tools or toys or obstacles.” 

“You’d never turn into him,” Arianna said with a swiftness and vehemence that shocked her. “You couldn’t act like that. You care too much about people — _all_ the people, even mortals. You’d never just think of them as tools.”

Swan smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “That helps.” He slid an arm around her. They stayed in that position for a few minutes.

Arianna ran her hands over the cape. “I think it’s a set of wings,” she said finally. “The books say she invented them, so it makes sense that they’d be buried with her.” She stood and put the cape on; it wrapped around her, trailing golden trim on the floor. A bit of Essence attuned the artifact easily. “Let’s find somewhere higher. I want to try these.”

When they emerged from the buried tower, it was around noon. There weren’t many tall buildings left in the city, so they selected the highest of the available ones and climbed to the top floor. 

Arianna looked out over the edge of the balcony. The streets five floors below were clearly visible, which was reassuring in that it was proof of decent weather, but also made it very clear how far she had to fall if she couldn't make this work. 

The cape felt gratuitously ostentatious, like a lot of the artifacts they'd found in the ruined city. She was hoping it turned into something a bit less gaudy once the wings activated. With a moment of concentration, she pushed Essence into the cape. It flared like a sunburst, and then the light was gone and she could feel wings. 

"How do they look?" she asked, after a few moments of trying to turn to get a decent look at her new wings. 

"Beautiful," Swan said immediately. "They look like a bird's wings. Mostly white, but gold at the feathertips - and they're huge." That was good to hear, given how big they'd have to be to carry a person. "Probably twenty feet across." 

She tried to move them forward to get a better look. “And they look like they're attached properly?"

She could hear him stepping in behind her, presumably to get a better look. "Yes. I didn't get to see Lilith's wings for very long, but these look basically like hers did." 

She reached up to touch the point on her shoulder blades where they merged with the rest of her body and found a joint that felt as natural as her elbow. 

“All right, then,” she said. “I suppose it’s time to try them.” She climbed up onto the balcony railing, her wings folded. Tzatli had been full of tall buildings, but a lot of them hadn’t taken the fall of the city and subsequent fifteen hundred years of neglect well — the one they were currently standing in was one of only a few remaining. If she could avoid crashing into the ground below, the bowl the city rested in would shelter her somewhat from the winds outside, too. 

She stepped forward, off the edge. 

Arianna dove headfirst past every story they’d had to climb on the way to the top of the tower, trying to force her wings out and catch the air. Finally, as the ground began drawing nearer at a truly alarming rate, she felt something shift. With a momentary burst of pain as they took the pressure of slowing her fall, her wings snapped out. They pounded the air and finally arrested her fall moments before impact. 

She looked up to see Swan leaning over the edge, and began climbing back up to him. Flying stressed muscles she’d never had much cause to exercise before, but it wasn’t particularly harder than walking. On the way, she took the opportunity to slide through the air a bit and see how she could move laterally. A feeling of bright freeing ecstasy suffused her. 

“I’m flying!” she called to Swan, and immediately felt silly for it. He could see that perfectly well. 

He didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he smiled widely. “That’s amazing!” he shouted across the gap. 

Arianna managed to cross over to the balcony and collapsed onto the ground. Swan was there immediately, pulling her to her feet. “How was that?”

“It’d be better next time, I think,” Arianna said, “now that I know how to. But it was _amazing_ — the feeling of freedom, of being able to go anywhere…” She trailed off. 

They kissed, still on the balcony.


End file.
